L'ENVOI.
"Fair love that led home."
Judith Moore did not die. She had fallen asleep that day with her fingers trembling about Andrew's sunburnt hair. He held her tenderly till a deeper sleep weighted down those clinging hands, and they fell.
He watched by her, without movement, almost without breathing, with the look on his face as of one who battles with Death, pitting all the splendid vitality of his being against the enemy, casting the mantle of his brave soul, strong will and perfect love about the trembling will and failing heart that were so nearly vanquished.
Indeed, so completely did Andrew identify himself during those silent hours with the woman he loved, that ever after she had some fleeting touches of his courage, and he had always an intuitional tenderness towards a woman's illogical weakness.
The fusion of these two natures took place not in those sweet after hours of passion, lint in that silent room, into which now and then there peeped a white-capped nurse or a black-a-vised little man, who saw always a great mass of fading pink blooms, a pair of broad shoulders in shabby velveteen bent tenderly over the shadowy outline of a little head sunk deep in the pillow.
After this supreme crisis there came a week or two of slow convalescence, and then a wedding that no one thought much of, regarding it merely as one of the prescribed formalities, like the buying of the railroad tickets, necessary before Andrew could take her away—away back to the village in the valley, to the old stone farm-house, to the homely flowers, the lindens on the hill, to Rufus and Miss Myers, where, for a time, she was not a wife at all, only a poor little wind-tossed song-bird blown to their bosoms for a refuge.
But that all changed.
Andrew wooed again a charming, capricious woman, walking by her adoringly over the old bricked walks beneath the horse-chestnuts, his very soul trembling with the love her voice and touch awakened: and she was playfully proud of her power, until suddenly some quick sense of the dominance of the love she aroused frightened her, and she turned to hide from him in his arms, tremblingly afraid, no longer asking love, but pleading against it.
Time passes with them. The old farm-house has had some architectural additions—a tiny conservatory, a long dining-room, with quaint porches and latticed windows: for Andrew and his wife appreciate too keenly the beauties of their home to mar its character by modernizing it. Andrew has learned to wear evening clothes as easily as he does his old velveteens, and—O si sic omnia!—himself often buys the little high-heeled shoes in which Judith's heart delights, for Judith never put off the old Eve of her harmless vanities.